John Lie-Nielsen

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There's some merit to the adage of working hard to play hard. With workers devoting their all to a business, especially when it's just getting off the ground, it can be easy for them to lose sight of their need for relaxation. Therefore, it is up to the leaders to intervene and help employees realize that their peace and mental health are just as important as the valuable work they do. Employees that relax and take things in stride are less likely to experience burnout or have emotional breakdowns. Here, eight leaders from Young Entrepreneur Council offer sage advice on how to encourage employees to take time off for relaxation as a core element of keeping them motivated and functional.

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Yes, you have the destination. But have you mapped out a realistic and cohesive strategy to see how you’re going to get there? 

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As more people are working from home and staying in, online shopping has become the dominant means of commerce. It’s more important than ever for small brick-and-mortar retailers to get their products online and accessible to their customers. However, with so many large e-commerce competitors like Amazon, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. To give these smaller businesses a leg up, we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council how brick-and-mortars can still thrive in today's digital landscape. Here’s what they had to say.

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As an entrepreneur, it’s important to create and implement a branding strategy for your business. This will help you better connect with your customers and share your company’s story/personality with your target audience. Developing a branding strategy can be challenging if you don’t know where to begin, so we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council to share some specific brands or personalities whose top-notch branding strategies are worthy of emulation. Read their responses to familiarize yourself with these successful branding tactics.

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Helping your community doesn't mean that your need to dedicate your company to philanthropic works. Even profit-based companies can give back to their communities in a significant way if they start incorporating philanthropy into their company culture or develop a community-focused approach to business operations. The company culture shapes how employees view the business and interact with each other. By promoting philanthropy, a business seeks to leverage its employees' knowledge and experience in a unique way that will build the business's reputation and do good within the community. To help, these ten experts from Young Entrepreneur Council share some of the techniques they use to build philanthropy into their company culture and explain why this matters.

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These tools and strategies can make email marketing more efficient and less time-consuming. Email marketing is still a handy outreach method for businesses. It offers something unique in how companies can interact with their clientele. The big problem many companies have with email marketing is how much time it takes up from its staff. But does email marketing have to be that time-consuming? One of the things that businesses have realized over the years is that anything which used to take time can become more efficient. Email marketing isn't an exception to this rule. Where research meant digging through tons of questionnaires and noting results, today you can simply access an automatically-compiled list of preferences, sorted by an algorithm. These lists enable businesses to develop targeted, personalized emails that resonate with their target audience. These tools are only the tip of the iceberg, however. As more and more companies are looking into developing personalized marketing techniques, research needs to finish faster than ever before. Specialized tools and software exist to help businesses realize results more quickly. However, many companies are still in the dark about how they could streamline their email marketing to take up less time. We asked 17 thought leaders from YEC their take on the best tools and strategies to make email marketing a more efficient enterprise. Here's what they had to say.

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User experience (UX) informs your consumer's overall impression of your business. Like all other first impressions, you need to make this one count, or else your buyer might just consider going elsewhere. Unfortunately, many young businesspeople underestimate the importance of user experience. Modern business is nothing like the “Field of Dreams” -- it takes more than just building it to make people come. You need to offer a unique user experience to make the visit memorable and worth sharing with others. To help, eight professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council explain what they learned about the importance of UX and how they have used these lessons to enhance this experience for their customers.

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With the number of tasks that an employee has to accomplish daily, many managers believe that it's impossible to monitor staff workloads accurately. The problem becomes even more involved in organizations where it's difficult to track the movement of jobs between departments. However, even though the process may seem like a futile one, several managers and leaders have started looking into ways to monitor employee productivity practically. Experts in many disciplines have developed techniques that aren't just effective at tracking workload completion and status but are flexible enough to be applied in many situations. We consulted eight professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council about the most effective employee monitoring methods they use and why they're so effective at getting the job done.

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Running a business is no easy feat, and with each new challenge that arises, an entrepreneur risks becoming buried under the weight of the responsibility. There's no way that an individual can stop the flood of responsibilities, so the only option that a new business owner has is to find an effective and efficient process for managing the situation. Some strategies designed to help leaders avoid being buried under the responsibilities of a business work far better than others, but it's challenging to know from a glance which ones are good and which ones aren't. These eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council look at the most effective strategies they use to avoid becoming a victim of their business's increasing demands.

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Businesses run on money the way engines run on fuel. Knowing how to effectively save money, especially when a business first gets started, is a great way to build capital to help the company grow. Funding is usually one of the most significant hurdles for a new business to overcome. Unless the company already has an angel investor, this stumbling block might be the one that dooms the enterprise in the long run. However, with a little bit of know-how, an entrepreneur can implement effective methods to save money, even in the early days of a company's operation. Below, seven professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council describe their proven methods for saving money while trying to get their business off the ground.

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Marketing is only truly effective if it strikes a chord with the audience it's intended for. Brand messages resonate more when the business aims them at the right audience. Since branding happens across multiple channels, having a consistent plan for both content and media is necessary. As with most marketing strategies, a coherent method needs to focus on the consumer first. The audience needs to know what the brand is offering and that the product is specifically geared to their needs. Below, eight contributors to Young Entrepreneur Council look at how a business can plan its media and content marketing to target their ideal customers effectively.

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In the modern world, entrepreneurs typically need to maintain both an online and offline presence to generate business. It’s important to connect your digital and real-life persona to keep a consistent image, which can ultimately help build trust with your potential customer and follower base. The members of Young Entrepreneur Council have spent time honing their personal brands to grow their business. Below, they share 10 ways to successfully connect your offline and online marketing efforts.

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Fundraising for a startup is an involved process. At any step of the way, the system may falter and lead to the company missing out on significant funding. There's no step-by-step methodology for developing a startup funding plan. Each startup is unique, both in the ideas they present and the promise that they make to customers. However, for fundraising, it's not the customers' input that matters. It's what the investors think of the company. A startup's fundraising efforts hinges on its ability to make itself attractive as a business idea. To help, 12 members of Young Entrepreneur Council reflect on the big mistakes that they made while fundraising, and offer advice on how today's startup entrepreneurs can avoid falling into the same trap.

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